Embracing Chaos

My old pal Stephen Hawking has been in the news a lot today for going on a vomet-comet ride.  (Okay, we’re not really old pals, but we’ve chatted a couple of times, notably at my grandpa’s memorial service where he gave a really touching eulogy.)  At a press conference before his flight, Stephen said:

"Life on Earth is at an ever-increasing risk of being wiped
out by a disaster such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a
genetically engineered virus or other dangers."

On this point I completely agree with him.  This idea was a key point I made in my recent Ignite talk on Transhuman Morality.  We’re going to wipe ourselves out.  But as far as what we should do about it, Stephen and I disagree.  He sees space travel as the route to salvation.  This planet is getting burned up, so we’d better find a new one, so the logic goes.  I think this line of reasoning is unrealistic and even reckless.  The idea that we can stop worrying about saving this planet is the reckless part.  Having an out like this encourages people to act irresponsibly.

The reason why it’s unrealistic is more subtle.  I said at Ignite that we won’t be flying around in space ships visiting other planets like in Star Trek, and people hassled me about it.  I know this is a little heretical for a futurist to say, but I believe it.  I should clarify a bit: I think it’s likely we’ll visit the other planets in our solar system — there’s plenty of useful matter here that we can mine and put to good use.  But a physical conscious entity leaving this solar system is tantamount to suicide as far as any relationship that entity could hope to maintain with the culture here is concerned.  The recent discovery of an earth-like planet only 20 years away puts this idea into perspective.  Even if we could make a trip at an average speed of half light speed, (a reasonably aggressive goal considering the need to accelerate and decelerate) a round-trip would take 80 years.  80 years ago the world saw the first telephone trans-atlantic telephone call.  In another 80 years, many believe we will have hit the information singularity meaning who knows what will be here.  Return would be nearly impossible, and almost certainly pointless since the world one would return to would be completely alien.  Leaving to colonize?  Possible I suppose, but good luck.  And at that point I really don’t think there would be any motivation.

My main point is that by the time we have sufficient technology for interstellar travel, we won’t have physical bodies any more.  The robot revolution will be complete.  As a society we will be much more concerned with creating faster computers in which to store our consciousnesses than with whatever we think we’d achieve by leaving the solar system.  Colonization might take the form of transmitting executable programs that represent our personalities into deep space with the hopes that some society will pick them up and try to execute them on whatever hardware they have.  Or perhaps sending out a nano-seed that knows how to build a receiver to pick up such a signal.  But it’s hard to imagine sending a physical copy of the data that represent our personalities in a format that’s compressed enough that it could be executable, while including the plans for making a more powerful computer to run on.  If we were at this stage, the only reason to do so would be because we had converted all the physical matter in our solar system to become information processing machinery and we needed more raw material with which to represent our thoughts.  That day may come, but it will not be soon.

So I agree we should continue to pursue space exploration, because it helps advance technology.  But it is not a way out of our pressing environmental concerns.  The world needs geeks to transcend beyond biological bodies.  But geeks need hippies to keep the world around for long enough to get there.

[Vomet comet picture courtesy of Kevin Boydston.]

I lost my temper today.  It doesn’t happen often, but it always gives me pause to reflect on how I might have handled the situation better.  In this case I think it’s pretty clear.

I was biking home from work, riding up Pinke on my normal commute route.  A bus was stopped in the right lane so I moved into the next lane to pass it.  As I did this, a white SUV (IIRC license plate 974-PPF) pulls up close behind me, revving its engine and honking repeatedly.  The driver yells out of the window "Get out of the road!"

My immediate reaction was what I always do in such circumstances which is to assert my position in the middle of the lane to ensure that the car doesn’t try to zoom by without leaving me enough room.  In the next block he found space to pass in the third lane, yelling obscenities on the way until a red light stops him.  I ride up next to him to have a chat.

At this point my blood pressure is quite high and I’ve pretty much lost control.  As I rode up I yelled "Do you have a problem sharing the road?"  His thoughtful response was "Get out of the !@#*& road.  I’m in a car."  Regrettably at this point I just laid into him for being lazy and contributing to global warming, to cheers from passing pedestrians.  The light changed and we went our own ways.

What makes me most sad about this interaction is that I didn’t make the time to understand what was going on in his head.  I would have enjoyed exploring the logic that accompanied "I’m in a car."  I might have learned something by listening a little better.

I’m also disappointed in myself for losing my calm.  His behavior was so patently absurd that I shouldn’t have any reason to get upset over it — it’s not like h was pointing out my personal failures or anything like that.  Arguably the implicit threat of physical violence on me justifies anger, and that the accompanying adrenaline actually helps me deal with the situation.  But the subsequent clouding of judgment really doesn’t help.  A fear reaction might have achieved the same benefits of adrenaline with a slightly more measured response.

Overall I wish I’d remained calm.  I’m hoping that by reflecting on the situation like this I might prepare myself to handle it better next time.

After many months of talking and thinking about it, I finally wrote a greasemonkey script to annotate web pages with Rhaplinks.  The script scans web pages looking for the names of musicians and when it finds them, links them to Rhapsody.com so you can listen to music by the named artist.

This simple idea is actually tricky to implement properly.  Rhapsody has a lot of music and a lot of artists.  So many that keeping the entire list in a javascript program is impractical, as is downloading the entire list from the server.  So I took the most popular 50-100 artists in each primary genre and combined them into a single manageable list of about 1,000 names.

This idea is made practical by one of my favorite features of Rhapsody.com — human-writable URLs.  Assuming your browser is set up properly (install plugin, enable pop-ups), opening http://play.rhapsody.com/Morcheeba causes Morcheeba to start playing.   This API (can URL’s be API’s?  I think so!) accepts punctuation too — http://play.rhapsody.com/R.E.M. will play R.E.M.  And thanks to a generous interpretation of the HTTP spec by just about everybody, http://play.rhapsody.com/The Postal Service actually works too.  (Note the technically illegal spaces in the URL.)  What this means is that my script just needs a list of the names of the artists, and doesn’t need corresponding ID values to generate the playback URL.  In fact, you can browse www.rhapsody.com for quite a while before ever seeing a database ID in your address bar.  Which brings me to the interesting part of this post.

Computer Science Interlude

Javascript is a slow, interpreted language.  The straightforward way to write this script would be to loop through a list of artist names, replacing each one in the document.  Something like this:

var artists = ['The Postal Service', 'Morcheeba', 'Massive Attack', 'Madonna', 'Tosca', 'Underworld' ];  // The actual list is much
longer...

for(var i=0; i<artists.length; i++) {
   document.body.innerHTML = document.body.innerHTML.replace( //... some regular expression
   );
}

This script would run very slowly.  To scan an HTML document with N characters for M artist names this way would take O(N*M) time.   Instead I wrote the script in just 2 lines as follows:

var regex = /\b(The Postal Service|Morcheeba|Massive Attack|Madonna|Tosca|Underworld)\b/gi;  // The actual list is much longer...

document.body.innerHTML= document.body.innerHTML.replace(regex,"<a href=\"http://play.rhapsody.com/$1\" title=\"Play $1 on Rhapsody\" >$1<img src='http://www.rhapsody.com/favicon.ico' alt=\"Play $1 on Rhapsody\"/></a>");

This might look like a cop-out — a cheezy easy way to do this.  But it’s actually much faster.  This will run in about O(N) time (assuming N>>M).  The single giant regular expression looks for any of the artist-name-keywords and applies it to the whole HTML document at once.  Firefox’s highly-optimized C++ regular expression engine compiles the big artist list into a single state-machine which is applied to the HTML much faster than anything I could possibly write in javascript.  Regular expression interpreters are brilliantly efficient.  Check out Jeffrey Friedl’s excellent Regular Expressions book if you want to know more about this highly practical topic.  The result is that the script can parse a document for a large number of artist names in a totally tolerable amount of time.  There’s a short delay when the page loads, but it’s still faster than browsing in IE.

Enough Theory.  Let’s get down to practice!

The script isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty neat to use it to browse Myspace or Facebook and have a lot of the music people mention be instantly playable. 

If you’d like to play with it, install Greasemonkey, and then install the Rhapsody Artist Linker script here.

[Update 5/4/07: a new and improved script is available here.  Read about the changes.]

The house where my nameserver lives lost power today.  I’ve moved DNS service to a professional hosting service to avoid similar problems in the future, thus continuing the trend of moving services into the server cloud.  It’s probably best since the server closet at that house is also the laundry room.  When we set up that house we understood something few MIS folks do — computers really love warm damp environments.</sarcasm>

Anyway, sorry for the inconvenience.  Everything should be back to normal in a few hours.  (If you’re reading this, it almost certainly is.)

Everybody’s reporting this morning stories about how Yahoo has launched the first legal lyrics website.  This is an impressive feat considering how complex rights to song lyrics are.  Two companies, Gracenote (formerly CDDB) and a Canadian startup, LyricFind, have been working for years to aggregate the rights to popular song lyrics to create such an offering.  At CES this year, both were actively trying to drum up business.  LyricFind has partnered with AMG to distribute their lyrics.  Yahoo chose the better-established Gracenote as their data provider.

I’ve spent some time looking around this morning, and I can’t find any lyrics on Yahoo.  Anywhere.  Maybe they pushed it out and realized it couldn’t take the load and pulled the plug?  Or maybe it just didn’t get finished in time.  In any case, it appears to be a fascinating case of vaporware.  Either that or the implementation is absolutely atrocious, which I doubt.

If any can figure out repro steps to display lyrics on Yahoo, please leave a comment.

[Update 11:45 am: Techcrunch reports that the lyrics will be live "later today."]

This morning when my alarm went off it wasn’t the numbing pleasantries of NPR reporters telling me everything wrong with the world.  It was a maddening multi-tonal chirp as if a band of crazed robots were about to bulldoze my house to make way for a new interstellar bypass.  It certainly woke me up, and fortunately I had a nice yoga practice to restore my nerves.  But I spent a few minutes futzing with my Sonos to figure out why it had played its internal "Chime" noise instead of KUOW like I wanted it to.

I determined that the problem was not user error.  I had in fact asked it to play the news, not the robots.  But my net connection appeared to be down this morning for some reason.  And when the Sonos failed to connect to KUOW’s streaming servers, it decided that the best thing to do was to play its internal alarm noise.

So I wanted to send some props to the Sonos engineers for yet again building a product that exceeds my expectations in terms of user experience.  Things screwed up, and it still did a fine job.  Now if they’d just add search functionality for Rhapsody content, they’d be 100% there.  As it is to find an arbitrary artist, I need to pop open a laptop, browser to rhapsody.com/(artistname) and add it to my library to get quick access through the Sonos controller.  A bit of a hack, but it works.  Anyway, I’m not here to gripe, but to thank.  And to offer advice for anybody who hasn’t figured out the hack yet.

Good job, Sonos.  Keep it up.

Charles Stross’s book Accelerando has a hilarious scene where a highly-augmented human loses his glasses which are his primary interface to the computer systems which support his thinking.  The character is so used to relying on these external systems for support that his immediate response is "Who am I?"  In first aid, we learn to rank somebody’s level of alertness and orientation by asking them if they know their name, where they are, what time it is and what happened, getting additional points for each successively harder question.  Without his glasses, this human was unable to answer even the easiest question, and would be medically classified as verbally responsive, but neither alert nor oriented.

When I was on vacation recently I realized I was close to being put into a similar situation.  When traveling abroad, I’m always keenly aware of what happens to me if my stuff gets stolen or otherwise lost.  I always follow a best practice of keeping my passport, plane tickets home and cash very close to my body in a place that’s not easily accessible.  On this last trip I realized that if I were left with just these things I would likely have no way to contact my friends and family back home.  Where we were, there wasn’t much internet.  Just about the only phone numbers I have memorized were those of my traveling companions.  Mom?  Dad?  Best friends?  Nope.  They’re in the phone.  And the phone could easily get lost or disabled.  (I should be so lucky as to have to replace that piece of junk.)

When I realized this, I copied down some key phone numbers onto a piece of paper in my money belt.  Not a big deal, but an interesting realization about how much of my working set has been externalized.

First, I’d like to welcome everybody landing here after searching for something on Google.  I hope you find what you’re looking for.  I know Google has been crawling my site nearly since its launch, and I’ve been passively wondering when would this site show up in Google’s search index.  It’s been in Yahoo and MSN for ages, and getting more and more links from high profile sites all the time.  Well I just got the answer: as soon as I gave Google money.  Surprised?  As a birthday present to myself, I bought a few adwords like:

I plop a few bucks into an adwords account and almost instantly the site shows up in the public search index, with a whopping pagerank of 2.  Not high enough that it was an obvious mistake to omit it from the index, but also not so low that it clearly doesn’t deserve to be in the index because there are other more important pages being indexed.  "Do no evil" they say.  This isn’t clearly a case of evil.  But it certainly seems like a bias.